


The Love of a Queen

by StudyinSilence



Category: 15th Century CE RPF, Henry V - Shakespeare
Genre: And Really Dumb Dukes, F/M, Kings & Queens, Queens With Big Problems, Willful Kings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-31
Updated: 2013-06-20
Packaged: 2017-12-13 12:34:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/824366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StudyinSilence/pseuds/StudyinSilence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Catherine de Valois, the Dowager Queen of England, muses on the ending of her first marriage and the beginning of her second. </p><p>Catherine de Valois/Henry V, Catherine de Valois/Owain Tudor</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Queen

"What is your name?" she asked the young man who had let her into her husband's chambers. She posed the question carefully in her new English, curious to learn the faces and names of the staff who served her husband, Henry of England. 

"Owain Tudor, your Highness," the Welshman bowed as he introduced himself, and Catherine smiled. 

"Very good, Master Tudor." 

_You are very beautiful._ As Catherine de Valois would remember much later, those were the words on the tip of her tongue the first time she saw the young man, back when he was just a groom in her husband’s household. She did not say them, of course, but they were true. He had thick sable hair and fine, expressive dark eyes and a youthful face with high cheekbones and a good, strong nose. Like most people, he was much taller than she was, and well-made, and his supple lips smiled at the sight of her. Then Henry had swept into the room with an armful of codices, trailing silks and fierce energy, and when he kissed her and hurried her along to their next engagement, Catherine had forgotten about the handsome squire. She did not think of him again other than when she saw him, and then only as the beautiful young Welshman who served her husband. 

Things changed when Henry died. Everything changed when Henry died. The English had been ascendant in France, driven by her husband’s powerful will. Ever since Agincourt, he had been certain that he had God on his side, and Henry would do everything within his power to win, believing himself in the right. What else could he assume, in the face of such an improbable victory? What else could any of them assume? For the longest time it had truly seemed that this was so. But time proved otherwise. 

Their destruction had begun with the death of the Duke of Clarence. That, she recalled, was when she was pregnant with little Harry. Thomas of Lancaster was the oldest of her brothers-in-law, and the one her husband seemed to like the least. Thomas obeyed him, but curtly and with a sour edge of burdened pride, and Henry never had a spare word for him. Rumor had it that he had cut the eldest of his younger brothers out of his will. Catherine knew that Thomas had once pledged himself to the Armagnacs, and she suspected that her husband had never forgiven the betrayal. 

It was a surprise, then, that when the news came of defeat at Baugé and Thomas’s death, that Henry looked pale and still. He sat through the herald’s report, bade him leave, and then left the room himself with hardly a word. When she went looking for him later, she found him hunched over his desk in his study. His hands were ink-stained and the documents that usually formed neat stacks along the sides of his desk now teetered in precarious piles, threatening to spill onto the floor. The clerk who hurried out as she entered, his arms full of papers and barely remembering to show due courtesy to his queen, looked especially harassed. 

At the sound of her footsteps, he scowled fiercely at the rows of sums in front of him, "Have you forgotten something, Master Smythe?"

It was phrased politely enough, but Catherine thought that it would be well for Master Smythe if he did not return until his duty had been accomplished. 

"Master Smythe is gone on your errand, my lord husband," she said, and his head shot up. His jaw was dark with stubble, his usually ruddy cheeks pale, and a smear of ink had transferred itself to the end of his sharp nose. His eyes were red. His lips parted in surprise at the sight of her. 

"Kate," he said, and blinked. 

Her skirts rustled as she crossed the room to his side. "You have ink on your nose," she said, wetting her thumb and gently rubbing at the black smear. His mouth flattened with annoyance sliding into unwilling amusement, but he bore her ministrations patiently. 

"There," she said, satisfied that it was gone. She carded her fingers through his cropped cap of hair, then slid her hand down to rest on his shoulder, rewarded by a slight unwinding of tension. "So, _Henri_ , have you found the missing sums you have been looking for?" 

He glanced down at the open account book, and the notes in his own angular hand written in the margins. "Not here. This belonged to a minor official who has been dead these last four years. I have only just had time to review them."

She smiled at him fondly. For as long as she had known him, he had always spent too much time doing things that other people were competent to do for him. No detail was too small for his attention, and when he felt he was right, he was too stubborn to be successfully argued with. He was determined that no problem should go unforeseen or undiscovered, and in matters of money, there were few people he entirely trusted. To England, he was not only head of state, war-leader, and dispenser of justice, but also head accountant. 

He also held his troubles in for far too long. To others, he seemed not to feel any setbacks with which he was faced, equable even on the edge of destruction. Yet, she had seen that he often felt more than he pretended. She considered how to pose her next question, "What is the effect of the outcome of this battle at Baugé?"

She felt the faintest of flinches under her hand before his eyes cut to hers, unreadable. The tension had returned. He answered repressively, "An embarrassing defeat, lost ground, and a rallying point for the Armagnacs."

"And for you? Your brother--"

It was like setting off a siege gun. 

"My brother - that rash fool, my brother," he said furiously, composure gone. He leapt out of his chair, "By the faith I owe to God and Saint George, how could he have been such a fool?"

"He had four thousand men, that treacherous fool, and he took fifteen hundred to fight five-thousand. A thousand Englishmen killed and five-hundred for ransom," he gestured violently as he paced up and down the room like a caged predator. The anger in his voice solidified as he spoke. "Huntingdon and de Umfraville would both have given him better council. He ignored it of course, and leapt to the attack without any concept of what he was facing. He never thought. He never planned. He did not maintain discipline; three-fourths of his army simply wandered off and he was so eager to take on the Scots and the Armagnacs that he left without them - without the archers! Umfraville's dead. Did he mean to exceed me? That _idiot_ ... and now...."

His voice trailed off, and he stopped short, his fists clenched.

“Go and bring ruin to those who slew him,” she had said, and felt only a little guilty. England was her country now. 

In the silence that followed, Henry clasped her hand. He met her eyes. His were black and piercing. "Yes." 

Over the next few weeks he had gathered up his followers and his supply lines, and then he left for France again. Before he left, he pressed his hand to her belly and a kiss to her forehead, and bade her keep safe. She thought that she was not the one to worry about. So many things to fell a warrior king... but she said nothing, as if to mention her misgivings was to give them credence. 

Riding out at the head of his army, Catherine thought he looked like an angel of judgment. 

The next time she saw him was after her beautiful little Henri was born. She had left England for the land of her birth in order to attend on her husband. She caught up with him in Paris, and he greeted her at the doors of le Palais de Louvre. Henry looked less like an angel of judgment and more like the portrait of a martyred saint, all hollow cheeks and burning eyes. His cheekbones looked sharp enough to poke through his skin, she had thought, and a pulse of fear went though her. He had been ill since the siege of a town called Meaux, the Duke of Gloucester told her when she asked. He would not cease working, no matter how his physician, Master Colnet, advised him. He insisted that he must act normally, or the Armagnacs would see it as an opening to strike. He insisted that this or that account needed to be double-checked, or that he needed to write an order for a new shipment of grain. There was always something else to do, and all the while Henry’s flesh drew tighter over his bones. 

On and on he went, until he collapsed while travelling and had to be carried to the nearest keep.

She always wondered, later, why none of them had done more to stop him. He wouldn’t listen to her, or to Master Colnet, or to Gloucester, or to anyone else, but surely there was more that they could have done. Why had they not strapped him down and fed him on broth until he was well? They could have faced his wrath, so long as he lived. Yet as it happened, it seemed that one moment, he was up and walking, and the next he lay in his death bed at le Chateau de Vincennes, stricken with the bloody flux and working feverishly to impart all his plans to his lieutenants. Catherine's memories of that night were fluid, as if she were under water or dreaming. All night, she had sat on a bench in the corridor outside his room, watching the people pass in and out. Servants with covered dishes, clerks with reams of papers, nobles with pressing questions. In the morning, the larks sung and the King lay dead.

He had never called for her. Neither had she been allowed in to say goodbye.


	2. The Dowager, Part I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Catherine brings Henry home.

Henry looked so very small, she thought when she saw him. Small and still. His stature was ordinary, but he had always seemed taller and broader than other men. Now the soul was gone and only the mortal shell remained, and it might have been the body of an ordinary man. A long, lean face like a cleric's, with dark hair shorn close. A soldier's torso, scarred and with the assymmetrical musculature of an archer. A musician's hands, folded over his chest. 

She placed her hand over his cold ones and leaned down to kiss his left cheek. The one with the scar, deep and discolored, which he had been so careful to always turn away from her when they were first married. She had long since broken him of that. 

She wished that she could have seen him, spoken with him, just one last time, before all that had made him Henry Plantagenet had flown away. She wished that he had called for her; that he had been able to face her at the end. 

She was not quite sure she could forgive Master Colnet for his too-sensible council that she should be kept away from the illness that was killing her husband. 

Catherine, the Dowager Queen, packed up her household and Henry's body, and began the journey home to England. She did not speak of her loss, despite her ladies' hesitant prodding. There was too much to describe; she felt sick with grief. Sick for her son, who would have no father, sick for England, doomed to a long minority when no one knew what kind of man her little Harry would become. Sick even for France, whose suffering, she suspected, would be drawn out much longer as the wild dogs returned to tearing at her like a scrap of meat, with no one strong enough to prevent them. Sick for herself, newly alone among people whom she knew were not all her friends and guarding a large, empty hole in herself where Henry had once resided. 

When the word came of her father's death, a mere two months after her husband's, she wept bitterly. Not for her father; her memories of him were of the madman who had shrieked at her in a garden when she was a child. There was sadness for him, yes, but she privately felt that death was a mercy for a man whose own mind had become his prison. 

She wept for Henry. If he had lived only two months longer, he would have had his throne of France. For a moment, she had let herself imagine it; the Crown of Charlemagne glittering around his temples and his expression luminous below it, under the high gabled ceiling of Notre-Dame de Riems. His utter seriousness in taking charge of ball and scepter, the symbols of the duties he had chosen to take on. Only later, he might look to her and smile - not his bright public smile, but the small, private curve of lips that showed that he meant it. She imagined justice in France, for Henry had always been devoted to justice. She imagined France prosperous under his rule, as England had been, and the wild dogs kenneled. Catherine had never seen a prosperous country, until she came to England. 

Painfully, she shook off the vision, for it would never come to pass. She had recalled that the war was not over, and may have continued for years yet. She fondly remembered Henry buried in his work, and wondered how much she would have seen of him then. She remembered, too, her poor, treacherous brother Charles, and thought that nothing good could have become of him. She could not remember Henry showing real malice, other than his grief-mired vengeance after Baugé, but he had never shied from what he saw as needing to be done. 

And yet Catherine found that she still wished for it. 

The weather was growing cold again, and the Narrow Sea was stormy during their crossing. The crowds that met them at Dover were somber, and she saw many weeping in the streets as the funeral procession went by. A funeral procession that should have been a triumphal homecoming, instead.

 _The King is dead, the King is dead,_ the churchbells cried. 

Catherine felt like weeping again. 

The funeral procession snaked its winding, dignified way to London. Mourners flocked to meet them in every village and town along the way. Dirges haunted Catherine's step by day, and Henry her dreams by night. By the time they had reached St. Paul's Cathedral, Catherine wanted nothing more than to hold her baby in her arms again. 

The funeral took place at Westminster Abbey, according to Henry's instructions. Catherine thought he would have approved of the magnificent spectacle it made. He had always had a flair for theatre. The building-fronts were all hung with black crape. Standards glittered in the sunlight, red and rich blue and spun with golden thread. The royal arms - Plantagenet lions quartered with Valois fleur-de-lis, Lancaster roses, and Henry's personal devices - a swan, an antelope, and a beacon - could be seen wherever one looked. The crowd stretched out as far as the eye could see in all directions, watching as four matched black horses slowly drew the gilded carriage bearing his coffin into the nave. Henry's wooden effigy lay atop the coffin, the painted figure dressed in ermine and cloth-of-gold. Catherine privately considered it an inadequate likeness. 

Requiem chants hovered over the air, the monks' deep song haunting even to those who did not understand the words. Catherine did. _Dies Irae_ \- a hymn of wrath and resurrection. _Pie Jesu Domine, Dona eis requiem. Amen,_ sang the monks. "Lord, all pitying, Jesus blest, grant them thine eternal rest. Amen," she echoed. 

The bishops in their black vestments chanted prayers over the coffin in fluid Latin, remembering Henry to God. Catherine asked Him, not for the first time, why He had taken Henry so soon. They had only been married a little more than two years. She had wanted more time with him. More children. In the waning days of Henry's life and after, she had hoped for another child. She had hoped to give little Harry a brother or sister, and England and France another possible heir - for of Catherine's ten siblings, less than half had grown up. She had wanted to give herself another piece of her husband to hold. Yet her courses came and went, regular as the tide. 

A single voice raised to sing the _Libra me, Domine,_ and the Archbishop sprinkled holy water over the coffin. The smoky haze of incense wafted through the Abbey, frankincense heavy and sweet in Catherine's nose. She resisted the temptation to cover her nose and mouth with her sleeve. The flickering glow of burning candelabras was all but lost as the light shining through the stained glass windows caught the clouds of smoke, pale shafts cutting through the gloom. That single clear, rich voice sang the vesicles, and then the deeper-voiced choir would reply as a rumbling echo. The effect was nearly dreamlike, and somehow terribly ominous. 

What was God's purpose, she wondered, in calling Henry to His side before his purpose had been fulfilled? Catherine could imagine little good coming to England or France in the foreseeable future. Her remaining brothers in law, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and John, Duke of Bedford were meant to head the regency council. Bedford had charge of France, where he was even now, and Gloucester had the oversight of England and her son's care. Bedford was eminently sensible and capable, of course, but Gloucester... was nothing of the kind. He loved Bedford, and had loved Henry as well as Henry had loved him, but Catherine, who was well-acquainted with many of the central figures of the civil war in France, knew the scent of overreaching ambition. Her memory of the old Duke of Burgundy, Jean the Fearless, was far too clear for her to be comfortable with being in the power of such a man. And even Bedford was not Henry, and capable though he was, he did not have Henry's force of personality. 

The funeral mass ended with the singing of _In paradisum_. 

A chantry chapel was to be raised over the body, and a tomb built of wood and bronze and silver. Neither, of course, would be completed before the year was out. Indeed, it would most probably be several years before work ceased. As it was, a temporary structure had been put into position in the intended place, and some of the highest nobles in the land lifted the coffin onto their shoulders in order to convey Henry to the place where he would lay for eternity. 

_May the ranks of angels receive you, and with Lazarus, once a poor man, may you have eternal rest_.

There was a slow exodus from the Abbey. The great doors were flung open once more, letting in cold air that thinned the fog of incense. The press of bodies eased until only the clergy, and a few nobles and retainers remained. There was Gloucester, dressed in a sweeping velvet houppelande and cloak, glittering with jewels and embroidery lavish enough that he might have been a king himself. He stood by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry Chichele, giving final instructions which were undoubtedly unneeded, as Chichele knew his duties and had himself been in the King's confidence. Chichele bore Gloucester out patiently, nonetheless. 

Catherine took one last look toward where her husband's body lay - there, again, was that choking lump in her throat, and then she turned to one of her ladies, Joanna Belknap, and said, "Tell my lord of Gloucester that we will go outside to await his pleasure, so that we may depart for the royal residence when he is ready."

"Yes, my Lady," responded Lady Belknap, who then curtsied and went over to the duke. She spoke to him, and Gloucester looked up and caught Catherine's eye. His face was pale and pinched, somber enough for the occasion, and she thought his grief was genuine. But he regarded her as he usually did - consideringly, as if he was weighing up threat versus value. Bedford looked at her similarly sometimes, but he had never made her as uneasy. He nodded acknowledgement, and said something to Lady Belknap before waving her back to her mistress. 

Lady Belknap hurried back, in as dignified a manner as one could hurry. Her dark skirts and veils trailed along behind her. "The Duke of Gloucester said that my lady should take herself outside if it pleases her, and that he shall be along presently."

"Thank you, Lady Belknap," Catherine said. She looked from Joanna Belknap's fair English face to Gloucester, who was now speaking to his uncle, Thomas Beaufort, Duke of Exeter. She looked back to her ladies again, and said, "Come."

Catherine turned and walked resolutely out of the Abbey. Her ladies followed her like a line of ducklings. It was bright outside, and it hurt her eyes after the gloom of the Abbey. Most of the people who had vacated the Abbey still lingered outside, though the crowd was smaller now than it had been before. Snow had fallen, a dusting of white on railings and trees and a layer of slush trampled into the streets. It had snowed during Henry's coronation, as well. A blizzard then, and now only the faintest sprinkling. 

She tucked her hands inside her furs, and breathed in the outside air. The smells of unwashed bodies and decaying foodstuffs were not as omnipresent in Westminster as they were even in the cleaner parts of London, though the usual vibrant color of the town had been all but extinguished by tragedy. Her eyes were burning again, and a sob was suddenly fighting to escape. She shut her eyes and ruthlessly crushed down the tears: all that escaped was the faintest gasp. Then she felt a hand on her arm, a gentle pressure, and turned to see Jehanne de Courcy, who had come with her from France. Her blue eyes were sympathetic, but she said nothing. Catherine clasped the offered hand and held it. 

Gloucester let them wait a goodly amount of time before he emerged from the Abbey with his entourage in tow. Another of his uncles, Cardinal Henry Beaufort, was with him, and the two members of the royal family were frowning at each other, in the midst of a hushed but intense disagreement. Gloucester looked angrier than the Cardinal did, and angry at the Cardinal; therefore the Cardinal must have said or done something to upset the duke. Catherine could not quite hear what they were saying, but a feeling of foreboding crept over her as she wondered if this would set the tone for the future. 

God forbid that what had happened in France should happen in England.


End file.
